Memory as a dorsal spine

For the first in a new series of expositions presenting sound art works commissioned by RESONANCE, French artist Pascal Broccolichi created a next version of his Table d’Harmonie. It can be experienced as a mono-solo-exhibition entitled Invasive Harmonie, produced by RESONANCE co-organizer Le Bon Accueil at the Galerie EC’ARTS of the Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres in Rennes, France, until March 22nd. A couple of hours before Invasive Harmonie‘s opening on Thursday February 7th, Pascal gave detailed insight in the background and motivations for this impressive piece, which is a new phase and step in one of a number of continuing, evolving (research) processes that are an integral part of his method and approach in the making of art.

“With the notion, the concept, of table, comes always a scene: the scene of a meal, of things that are being discussed around it. The table’s top shapes relations among those that are gathered there. A table installs some sort of a game. A dialogue. Communication. Negotiation. A table dramatizes in and by itself. When I started to work in the EC’ARTS gallery’s space, I quite literally circumscribed a table on the floor: a surface, dimensions… Except, of course, that in the end the Table d’Harmonie is not perfectly flat. On the contrary: it has an awful lot of relief.”

“I always try to keep things evident, to keep things easily perceptible. And at the same time I try to have them border on paradox and tautology. Which is why this show is called Invasive Harmonie. Harmony is always total, always global; and invasive, almost by definition. This incites a repeat, a tautology. But you can also read Invasive Harmonie in a more indirect manner, and find two ideas that actually annihilate each other. So I am always steering near to either a ‘sur-definition’ or a ‘neutralization’. Which is also contained within the idea of a cartography. A map gives you a view of a territory that is global, but also local in its details. That allows for a circulation of energy (from the global to the local and back again) that, mind you, may very well be wasted, because in the end it leads you nowhere: while you are reading the map, you’d better stop moving; unless you want to break you neck…”

“Over the years, as part of my artistic output, there of course are what one usually calls ‘works’. But there are also a number of things, projects, that are more like research processes. Things that I started at some point and that I have continued doing ever since, without a foreseeable end. One of these processes is Table d’Harmonie, which I started as long ago as 1998. In this particular process I try to reach a way of thinking about how to organize the possible dimensions of listening along two quasi-contingent axes: one that leads to observation through the eyes – via the image – and the other to observation through the ears – via the sound. Here the interest and difficulty are not so much a differentiation, a separation of image and sound, but – on the contrary – the enrichment of an existing perceptual phenomenon. I am convinced that the majority of sonic contexts in which we find ourselves are, arguably, sonic images, sonic interpretations. An awful lot of the sounds that pass through us as part of the flux of our day-by-day environments, are intimately linked to sonic images.”

long term

“Table d’Harmonie is a long term experiment, which means – and this is important – that each of the successive installations is like an instrumentarium through which the research advances. You will notice that I am careful not to speak of instrument. It is not a musical instrument. The sounds you hear are not being generated by the heaps of sand. In fact, you may consider the sound to be fully independent of the installation. Again this is the sort of relation that interests me. A lot. But at the same time, Table d’Harmonie – which is French for sound board – is a term that strongly refers to music and musical instruments. The sound board of a piano is an intricate architecture (maybe we should call it a theatre of operations) that makes it possible for the instrument to resonate. In its metal structure you will find these holes for the air to circulate. Similarly, in the Table d’Harmonie there’s multiple streams of sound circulating inside of the little craters.”

“In my approach to this process, memory is the dorsal spine; it’s memory’s time-lapse, the time that it takes for things to install themselves, before they either persist or disappear. Before they reveal themselves as remanent and re-appearing, or as essentially furtive, leaving nothing but an indeterminate and very vague impression. What I want to try and understand is this permanent passing from the one to the other, in more or less concomitant or in fully separate ways…”

“When you enter the gallery room, on the floor you see all these heaps of black sand, material that, by the way, is an important ingredient of my research. I made all of these heaps (there are 66 of them) from precisely the same quantity of sand. Each of the heaps has an identical, conic, form, initiated by versing the sand on the floor, at very precisely indicated spots, the location of which is also of the utmost importance to me. The visual and the sonic image – evidently – will simultaneously cooperate and work against each other… as images of lines, as images of waves…”

gestures

“Over the years the forms that I use have evolved. For Invasive Harmonie the gesture that I applied – and this is exactly what it is: a gesture – is a very simple one. When I speak about ‘inscription into memory’, I refer to the fact that there is something – quite literally – being engraved. It is the repetition that lends the gesture of my silting a temporality, which, like a metronome marking rhythm, also marks memory. Therefore, within this process, the artistic gesture is so very important. All of the time that I spent developing the installation has been marked by these gestures that, to me, are like a ritual: the pouring of always that same heap of sand on the floor, making it conic, then taking the end of a vacuum cleaner’s tube, bringing it to the cone’s summit and then going down, aspirating sand until the tube is touching the floor… The result is this little crater, the remains of something that first was erected, then reduced and aspired, dissolved. Very simple. But I like these simple repetitive rituals. A lot. This room is about 80 square meters, and it is the ritual making of the ‘drawing’ on the floor that lends it its density, its massive presence; that enables it to invade all of the space.”

“The repeating of modules – four, five, four, five … – lend it an undulation which makes it a resemble a sound drawing, a drawings of waves, some interpretation of a sonic rhythm. Well, that’s close, but no cigar! It is more like a spatial cartography, like an atlas. For I think that the essence of one’s listening is the building of a set of benchmarks, each one its own, in order to be able to resize a perceptual space. The more rigorously things have been subjected to an order, the more they all will seem to be equal… at first sight. But that is merely an impression, an hypothesis that will collapse again very quickly. Because it is untenable. Because absolutely identical things do not exist. Not in reality; and even less so in the reality of your perception.”

“When you place yourself at one of the corners of the installation, you will get the impression that the surface over which the sand craters are spread out is larger on one side than it is on the other; also the light plays a role, that comes falling through the side windows. The rhythm of the light and the relief, the thicknesses, that it creates … all are very important. The end result, as a reality, is almost paradoxical.”

“I do not favor the visual part, nor do I privilege the sonic part. It is all about the material and about the context within which the construction takes place. The precise rhythm and the repetitions are dictated by the space. In a different room (for example one that would be less formal, less rectangular) there probably would have been less regularity. But it will never become random or discontinuous. There always will be this continuity, even though I would not want the repetitive pattern of the image to prevail over the presence of the sounds. Neither should it be an illustration, like the image of the propagation of a wave. That would be too specific. One would lose the ambiguity between image and sound that I find so essential.”

“The material that I used for this version of the Table d’Harmonie is black Corundum dust. The gallery floor here has a light grey color, the walls are white. So for reasons of contrast I picked a dust that is both very abrasive and very brilliant and crystalline. At the same time it is very black, and has the massive presence that I am looking for. On the other hand, when you watch it from a distance, it creates an almost velvety atmosphere. Like if it were a sort of foam. Which is yet another thing that disrupts reality.”

“In the end, what we get is a synthesis: of the image, the physical presence of the material and of the sound. Together they constitute the cartography that corresponds to a landscape that has been imposed by the space. It is a landscape, with emerging lines of horizons that shift according to the point from where you watch it. The sonic landscape, however, eludes you. The sounds you hear are not meant to provide you with the listening comfort of a kind of sonic illustration of what you see.”

the sonic

“In earlier versions of Table d’Harmonie I used granular synthesis to work with sound in ways corresponding to those in which, say, a liquid flows. But here I used exclusively recorded, untreated, sounds. And though some have a sort of watery quality, most of them, appearing outside their original context, are pretty difficult to pin down. If we manage to focus and decontextualize, in any natural environment with exceptional qualities, we will seize sonic moments that are pure abstractions. For me these are musical forms at their peak! It’s there that I find musicality at its freest, its most autonomous and with the fullest potential of power.”

“I chained my Rennes recordings together into 4 separate tracks, each of which is playing back in a loop from a CD in one of four CD players. And in 16 of the 66 little craters there’s a loud speaker at the bottom. Some of these are for the low frequencies, others for the high frequencies. So the high and the low frequencies are strictly separated, and are being projected from different places, which correspond to distinct listening points, to listening axes that will allow as to remember what we heard at another spot. This, as a matter of fact, is what for me constitutes the sonic landscape: its the thickness of the relief, that comes into play as the distance to what we heard at an earlier time.”

“For some time already I wanted to work with other phenomena of flow and fluid. And in Rennes there are canals, with locks, that are still extensively used to transport goods by boat. So this was a great opportunity to investigate what is happening under water in these canals. I spent many days recording under water sounds in Rennes, using hydrophones with several tens of meters of cable. These are usually applied to reach great depths in oceans and seas, but I used them to cover great distances, by throwing them into the canals like a fishing line, and then dragging them along, while capturing the very rich and unusual sonic universe inside the water (in fresh water, sound travels at about 1500 m/s, as opposed to its speed of about 340 m/s in dry air), including the frictions, and all of the sounds that came from the many mechanical and motorized devices functioning in and around the canals. All of it I kept just as it was recorded, but I sorted the sounds according to their color, tonality, character, and in relation to the different points of diffusion in the gallery space. Out of this black landscape of identical, black craters, sounds emerge of many different colors, and with a temporality that, because of the different lengths of the 4 looped tracks, is continuously shifting. It is a sonic landscape with no beginning, and no end. The heart of the work as a composition is the spatial distribution of the divers sonic particles. In fact, before I created the landscape of craters, I placed the 16 loud speakers on the floor, at the exact spots where you see them now, by precisely defining the space’s geometry via a grid of thin wires that I spanned across the floor. This was then followed by a rather pragmatic process of playing back the sounds and listening, thus creating, in a way, a table of depths, relief, accidents, colors, temporalities… until I arrived at a spatial distribution that convened. So I worked at placing groups, families, characters of sounds, according to what later would be the route taken by the beholder of the piece. For, as you see, the space and the disposition invite you to go around; it is like a sculpture that you walk around. That there is a part that you see, and a part that you have to imagine (a hidden part, a part that is behind) has always fascinated me in the apprehension of a sculptural piece. In the Table d’Harmonie it is the sound that functions as the hidden part. The sounds are evolving in a pretty much autonomous way, and when you walk around the crater field, you will do so with a foresight of the sounds that will come after. That’s unavoidable, it’s familiarization. The problem that I have to solve – and this is where for me the work (much like that of a sculptor) really starts – is the following: how can I create accident, fracture, misunderstanding, confusion and paradox in the midst of all this? Something that departs from the evident that one tends to imagine?”

“So Table d’Harmonie is indeed, and profoundly so, a sculptural work, as much as it is a sound work. And creating a ‘sonic landscape’ also means, in a very deep sense, that you are doing a painter’s job; besides being on top of it all, at least partly, also very cinematographic, even though there is nothing like a ‘scene’. What I mean of course is a ‘cinema for the ears’, the construction of which will strongly depend on each of the separate beholders’ psychological states. For me, there are a number of quite heavy and melancholic moments. Others, on the contrary, are almost ethereal. But somebody else may experience it in a very different way. I do think that listening encourages this type of solitary relation to the self. And whether the listening will take place for a mere couple of seconds, or for several hours, for me this does not change the way in which I approach the work as an artist. In all of the possible cases my investment and my concern will be the same.”

…

You can visit and experience Pascal Broccolichi’s Invasive Harmonie at the Galerie EC’ARTS de l’IUFM de Bretagne, 153 rue Saint-Malo, Rennes (France), weekdays between 12h and 18h, until March 22nd.
Pascal Broccolichi’s website is at pascalbroccolichi.com.

§ 2 Responses to Memory as a dorsal spine

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